With the proliferation of available messaging services, supporting more than one separate messaging service has become a common feature for more and more messaging clients, such as multi-system IM (Instant Messaging) clients. Typically, a multi-system IM client provides the capability to set one presence status for a user of the IM client across different messaging services. For example, a presence setting for the user to appear as “Away” may be translated to an “Away” setting for all the associated messaging services in the IM client, such as AOL, Google, Yahoo, etc. The user may have multiple user accounts subscribing to the different messaging services. As a result, each user account has to appear “Away” in the corresponding messaging service.
Moreover, the presence status label (e.g. “Away” or “Busy”, etc.) for the same status can vary across messaging services. For example, one service can use “away” while another service uses another label for the same status indicating unavailability for message exchanges. Furthermore, the statuses may not match one-to-one between the services. This contributes to the difficulty in managing multiple messaging services.
Alternatively, a user may be required to set separate service specific presences for different user accounts in different messaging services. As the number of user accounts increases with the growing number of messaging services, however, iterating through multiple user accounts and keeping track of which service specific presences are supported by which messaging services tend to be tedious and error prone. Worse yet, as a buddy is able to communicate with the user via multiple buddy accounts and multiple user accounts, determining which service specific presence for each user account with respect to the buddy accounts may not be practically feasible, if not impossible.
Therefore, existing messaging clients and/or messaging servers do not facilitate a user with a friendly environment to manage presence statuses for multiple messaging services.